Method for controlling a combustion process, in particular in a firing chamber of a fossil-fuel-fired steam generator, and combustion system

1. A method for controlling a combustion process in a firing chamber of a fossil-fired steam generator, comprising:

providing the firing chamber of the fossil-fired steam generator; determining an arbitrary first number of spatially resolved measured values of the combustion process in the firing chamber using a spatially resolving measurement system;

converting, by a computer processor, the arbitrary first number of spatially resolved measured values into a second number, which is less the first number, of state variables using a variable transformation,

wherein the converting includes mapping spatial information about to individual characteristic parameters and consequently compressing the mapped data into the second number of the state variables,

wherein the state variables characterize the current operating status of the combustion process;

supplying the state variables as actual values to the second number of control loops in corresponding controllers for closed-loop controlling;

calculating setpoint deviations by the controller in order to identify deviations for corrective closed-loop control interventions in the combustion process;

distributing manipulated variable changes in the control loops among a third number of actuating elements in an inverse transformation taking into account an optimization target wherein the distributing includes producing a control signal for each actuating element,

controlling each of the actuating element using the control signal such that each of the actuating element is used for the corrective closed-loop control intervention in the combustion process,

wherein the optimization target is defined as a setpoint value for the state variables, and

wherein the first, second, and third numbers are natural numbers.

2. The method as claimed in claim 1 , further comprising:

evaluating reference variables from the following group of reference variables in order to determine the different state variables from the spatial measured values, wherein the reference variables include:

weighted average values with accentuation or suppression of parts of the space registered by the measurement technology means,

an average value of the measured variable over the space registered by the measurement technology means,

spatial position of the center of mass of the measured values, and

statistical characteristic parameters for spatial distribution patterns.

3. The method as claimed in claim 1 , wherein setpoint values for the derived state variables are defined in order to specify the desired operating behavior.

4. The method as claimed in claim 1 ,

wherein control interventions are derived for different manipulated variables, the combustion process being influenced in a targeted manner by means of the control interventions, and

wherein a control intervention acts on a plurality of actuating elements at different degrees of intensity.

5. The method as claimed in claim 1 , wherein different control interventions applied to different actuating elements by different identified setpoint value deviations are superimposed additively on one another to produce an overall control intervention for each actuating element.

6. The method as claimed in claim 1 ,

wherein in order to achieve the optimization target, a neural network is trained with measured process variables and used as a specific model for predicting the firing behavior.

7. The method as claimed in claim 6 ,

wherein on the basis of the firing response predicted by the neural network a beneficial distribution of the control interventions among the actuating elements as well as correction values for the actuating elements are determined by means of an iterative optimization algorithm.

8. The method as claimed in claim 6 , wherein the measurement is carried out on a cross-section of the firing chamber close to the combustion zone.

9. The method as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the spatially resolved measured values are selected from the group consisting of local concentrations of CO, O 2 , CO 2 , H 2 O and the current temperature in the firing chamber and combinations thereof.

10. A combustion system having a firing chamber, comprising:

a closed-loop control system having a combustion diagnosis unit, the combustion diagnosis unit being equipped with a spatially resolving measurement system in the firing chamber,

wherein the closed-loop control system is embodied for performing the method as claimed in claim 1 .

11. A fossil-fuel-fired power plant installation, comprising:

a combustion system as claimed in claim 10 .

12. The method as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the spatially resolving measurement system includes firing chamber cameras or an arrangement composed of lasers and corresponding detectors.